


when the wolf comes home

by limerental



Category: The Witcher (TV), Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: (Or is it?), Ambiguous/Open Ending, Character Study, Dubious Consent Due To Identity Issues, F/M, Morally Ambiguous Character, Pegging, Secret Identity, Somnophilia, Subterfuge, Unrequited Love, animal death (mentioned), technically
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-27
Updated: 2021-02-27
Packaged: 2021-03-18 17:40:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,387
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29737455
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/limerental/pseuds/limerental
Summary: While the smoke from Sodden's battlefield darkened the horizon, Lambert met an old friend on the road.He knew the Cat Witcher had never been what she appeared to be but could never guess how deep her secrets went.She made sure of it.
Relationships: Aiden/Lambert (The Witcher), Fringilla Vigo/Lambert (The Witcher)
Comments: 8
Kudos: 31





	when the wolf comes home

**Author's Note:**

> **content warning** for explicit sex (PIV, cunnilingus, somnophilia fingering, and pegging) where consent is dubious only due to unknown secret identity and manipulative motivation of one party, mention of past animal death, brief canon-typical body horror
> 
> this goes heavy on show canon
> 
> let me know if more tags or warnings are needed. not sure how intensely to tag this one.

Under a sky bruised by evening with the smoke from the war beyond the hills scattering ash across serene farmland, a scarecrow in a harrowed field dissolved into the shape of a woman, lithe and lean.

"Oh, fuck off," said Lambert, catching at the reins of his startled horse to still her restless prancing. The mare snorted, uneasy, and together, they watched the familiar shape slink across the rutted earth with more grace than should be possible. "Thought you must have died."

Golden eyes watched him, careful and calculating, seeming to glow in contrast to the woman’s dark skin. She wore light armor dyed black with ichor and two slender swords crossed along her shoulderblades. Last Lambert had seen her, fucking decades ago now, she'd worn a crown of tight braids, limned in blood-red ribbon, but now her hair was cropped close to her skull, the dense curls as black as her armor.

A medallion dangled at her throat, engraved with the image of a snarling cat.

"Not dead," she said with a clipped nonchalance and climbed the weathered fenceline along the road with ease, perching there to be almost of a height with him mounted on his mare. She drew out a slender pipe from a pocket, measured a pinch from a worn pouch of tobacco or some other herb native to the south, and lit it with a flick of her quick fingers.

"Burn my fuckin' mustache off if I tried that," he said. Lambert envied her the neat control of her Signs, more precise and careful than any other he’d known.

"Might be an improvement," she said with a quirk of her brow. She gestured with the pipe, and his mare side-stepped her outstretched arm, reined around by Lambert’s reassuring hand. He’d been right to choose this mount. Sharp girl. Could clearly sense the danger that hummed in the creature that wore the woman’s skin.

Lambert declined the pipe with a jerk of his head. Last time he'd indulged and smoked with her, he'd woken the next morning naked and robbed on a riverbed. No time for dalliances like that. He had places to be.

War likely to touch down here and everywhere before long. The fires to the west still burned a fortnight on, smoldering now more than raging, and he knew better than to trust that the North had been the decisive victor.

And now, Aiden, after how many fucking years. Lambert knew he couldn't trust her appearance to be anything but suspicious.

War left pockets of death all across the countryside, leaving a sucking vacuum of holes for necrophages and other evils to crawl through. He’d been traveling outside the scope of his usual hunting circuit, looping back south and trailing behind the path of the invading army.

Lucrative business for someone in pest control, if that someone lacked any scruples about robbing poor widows and starving villagers of their coin.

"How'd you know to find me out here?" Lambert asked.

"Who's to say I was looking for you?" asked Aiden, her head tipped to regard him as her lips closed around the stem of the pipe.

"If you didn't want to be seen, you wouldn't have let me see you. Wouldn't travel a road like this during the day."

She hunted by night, could have passed him in the dark like a shade.

"Maybe I saw an opportunity to talk with an old friend," said the Cat. "Or maybe you don't know me as well as you think."

"Naw, I know you," said Lambert, shaking his head. He rubbed a gloved hand against his thigh, other arm tugged as his mare restlessly fumbled with the bit. He squinted at the smear of black smoke that engulfed the horizon. "I know you're either playing carrion bird on the edge of the war or you’ve got yourself a target. Someone’s bought you."

“I’m retired,” said Aiden. “On a sight-seeing trip.”

Lambert laughed, louder than he expected in the hush of the gathering dusk. Even the birds and other wild creatures seemed to sense the oncoming war and held themselves quiet. Wisps of white breath plumed from his mare’s muzzle as she sighed into the cooling air.

“I know we're not friends.”

"No?" Blue puffs of smoke rose from her dark lips, curving into a plume. She rounded her mouth and shaped a tremulous ring that fluttered to crown her head briefly before it dissolved.

"Definitely not friends," said Lambert, staring at her mouth. If there was one thing he knew for sure, it was that he should just get on before it was too late.

"You're not wrong, Wolf,” said Aiden, voice warped deep by another long draw from her pipe. She expelled the last of the smoke with a loose exhale and tipped her pipe to scatter the ashes. "We aren't friends."

He should spur his mare on, disappear in a lurching gallop across the fields.

"I have a camp nearby, just past that windbreak,” she said with a tilt of her head, the last touch of evening glowing on the swell of her high cheekbones. “Come to bed with me. Old time's sake.”

“Sight-seeing,” said Lambert.

Couldn’t stop the rise of his heartbeat when she responded to his jest with the curve of an amused smile.

Without waiting for his answer, she slipped from the fence and was off along the dusty curve in the road, given up at once to the shadows.

* * *

He went to her. Like the downhill tumble of water against smooth rock.

Gravity. Laws of nature.

A witcher was a thing of animal instinct after all, made more animal than man, and the Cat even moreso. Of the experiments that had birthed her, he knew only rumors filtered through human gossip and what little she had told him. They'd been different than his, more intensive, not quite perfected. Something settling dark and primal behind her still gaze. Something that had been carved out.

Still, he went to her.

It was as good as it always had been, the way she gripped him around the waist with slender legs, pressing with her heels. The way she let him set the pace as she lay back. The brutish snap of his hips, his ragged panting lost to the gloom. He felt animal, rutting into the solid heat of her body and feeling her cold eyes stare up at him. She slid a hand down his spine to slip through the sweat of his tailbone and press two fingers into the cleft of his ass. Her expression shifted to smugness as his breath stuttered, and he clenched tight against her and was finished.

When he flopped off of her onto the grass of their hollow where she had made camp, she rolled to tap fingers along his collarbones.

"You'll let me take you tomorrow morning."

"I have to ride tomorrow morning," huffed Lambert, still out of breath. The Cat was woefully composed in comparison.

"And first," she said, leaning until her lips brushed to follow the path of her fingers. "You'll ride me."

"Shit," groaned Lambert. Her hands nudged at his shoulders until he got the picture and rolled back to her, low between the part of her legs. His hands on the soft meat of her thighs paled corpse-like in comparison to her dark skin.

A black stand of trees and a sweeping gully hid their fire from any man or beast passing on the road through the night, but Lambert felt intimately seen and observed all the same, as if the pale sliver of moon were the great eye of a dispassionate god.

He'd heard this called _worship_ , akin to kneeling at the altar of the Goddess. The lave of a tongue between a woman's legs. Reverent touches with mouth and hand at the sweet, warm heart of her.

But if Aiden had a heart, it was long-buried and still. If Lambert was kneeling here at her altar, it was as a mourner at a crossroads grave.

She sighed around a flick of his tongue. Humiliating how much it thrilled him to wring out that single gasp. More embarrassing still to know how many years it had been since their last meeting and still, that sick little sense of aching to please her remained.

Often, when the two of them did this, Lambert had the queer feeling that Aiden existed only partially within her own body, other parts of her lost somewhere or roaming the countryside or sputtered out like a candle short on wax. She was never fully there with him, not all of her. Fragmented.

His palms smoothed along her thighs and fit against the bony spur of her knees. He knew the shape of scars before he felt them. He knew her body.

Fuck, it had nearly been a decade, and he’d fooled himself into thinking he had forgotten.

Her breath caught on a shudder and hovered on the edge of a moan. Heat washed over him, spurred by her own show of pleasure. It was gratifying and arousing and distantly painful, that some part of him could still reach down into the well and touch some part of her.

Painful, because he did not know which part he touched and how true it was to the real shape of her.

He rushed like water to meet her, and she dissolved.

“You think very loudly,” breathed the Cat, tapping his temple with cool fingertips.

He stopped thinking and dropped into feel and taste alone.

The firelight burned his lips.

His hands touched the solid plane of her calves, as though tracing the anatomical shape of the muscle. As though it could allow him to dissect her into pieces kept as more than memory.

For all her lurid promises whispered under cover of darkness, Lambert anticipated waking alone.

* * *

The morning sun touched the hollow beyond the windbreak, and the Cat watched the last husks of leaves that clung to the trees shiver in a breeze not strong enough to scatter them. Frost had touched the farmland and the leaning tangle of brambles and the crested manes of the horses where they slept folded beside one another.

The Wolf folded beside her, his hands tucked up under his chin in sleep, his mouth open against her ribcage.

How bizarre to sleep beside him again, as she had been certain she never would have need to again.

The night before, she had heard each of his desperate little thoughts clearly, dropping like pebbles into a great well. Insignificant. She could swat them away like insects, allow barely a ripple to break the stillness of the water. He had such small, human fears and hopes and desires.

His emotional distress ran contrary to the common folktales surrounding witchers, but she knew better than to trust any old folktale. She had spun up enough myths of her own to know how easily simple-minded people accepted pretty lies.

How strange it felt to wear the skin of the Cat once more.

The Wolf that lay beside her was not simple, but he was minuscule, a being of trivial problems and plans that often did not extend beyond dinner, the next fork in the road, arrival at another sleepy town that served muddied ale.

He had been easy to tame from the start.

Feed him scraps, allow him to sit by her fire, and he ambled beside her like a pet.

He had saved her life once, long ago. Bore her out of a spot of trouble and stooped to feed her broth from a wooden spoon through the fever that took her afterward.

It had been curiosity at first that drew her back to him, a wish to catalog what sort of creature he was. Then, it had been ordinary flirtation. Pleasure-seeking. Even she was not immune to the release of a good orgasm, and he inspired plenty. Briefly, he had been a weapon that she directed, an extension of her arm. He grumbled and muttered but always gave to her whims, trotting away on some task or another.

It satisfied her for a time, to wind him up and watch him go, until his affliction took on a clearer shape. She saw his obedience for what it was.

He loved her. This iteration of her, at least. As much as a simple beast could love anything.

The trouble the Wolf inspired had long ago eclipsed his usefulness. But no longer.

A connection to this particular school of witchers had suddenly become very politically expedient.

Fringilla Vigo was nothing if not resourceful.

* * *

She had always taken many shapes, adapted many masks.

Quiet girl, shy and eager to please. Her family lived comfortably, their name well-respected. Before her gifts manifested, a place had been made for her as a priestess at a convent in the mountains. She had delicate fingers, neat stitching. It was said she would do just as well sewing oozing wounds as she did embroidery.

She did not mean to hurt the tomcat who strolled often along the alley wall behind her family’s townhouse. She intended only to stop its territorial yowling, to ease the tension of its curved spine, to smooth down the plume of its bottlebrush tail. She pretended this was true.

She wept over it in her mother’s arms. The stiffness of the body, the glitter of ice on delicate whiskers, the slump when chaos released it.

Her distant uncle swept in with a billow of robes and spoke in low tones as he told her what would happen next. Aretuza. Not his first choice of schooling for her, but the Brotherhood had grown wary of nepotism.

Earnest girl, wide-eyed and willing to learn. Still captured by awe over the grandeur of the island that housed Aretuza, the new world she had stepped into alive with shimmering potential.

Her first lesson sank its teeth into her and shook her in its mouth. She watched with a distant sort of horror as the flesh of her fingers sunk to the greyed shape of the bone.

The hereditary nature of her gifts forced her to be a model student, diligent in her work and never slacking. She knew her instructors looked over her shoulder at her dear Uncle Artorious, waiting for him to step up and smooth over her mistakes. So, Fringilla did not make any more mistakes.

It mattered little.

For all the thrill of lightning coiled in the palm of her hand, she did not leave any distinct impression.

For all her meek curtsying and sweet words, she was left with scraps. To Nilfgaard and the service of King Fergus. The monarch belched and farted, sprawled in exorbitant comfort on his gilded throne. He favored rich foods and orgies. He indulged in excess and in the surety that such excess would endure.

Obedient girl, head bowed in perfect servitude, ready to march where she was commanded. Fringilla stood serenely beside the throne, her hands folded together, her body held in stillness.

She kept that serenity as the Usurper struck the king’s head from his shoulders. No one ever discovered how he had disguised himself so completely until the last and fatal moment, who had cast the charm that disfigured and exiled the king's only son. She made sure of it.

The Usurper indulged in her adaptability, allowing her to take on new shapes. Spymaster as well as court mage. She found herself well-suited to the shadows, flitting here and there and gone before she could be pinned into one identity.

She played a scientist, mired deep in macabre experiments, testing the limits of chaos and new methods of inducing mutations. One such experiment, the Cat school, was largely a failure, unstable creatures unable to be commanded, but on a whim, she wore light armor and twin swords and became one of the beasts she had created.

She walked the streets unrecognized, and for once, did not despise it. Not a Vigo. Not the Usurper’s hand. Something else.

A thing detested for obvious marks of difference.

As a young girl, she had asked herself often _what do the others see? What is it that is wrong with me? What flaw do I have that makes them treat me this way?_

When she wore Aiden’s skin, it was the slitted pupils, the sluggish heart rate, the fangs and claws, the sharpness of a gaze that was not quite human that drew the people’s ire. She did not have to wonder what inspired their repulsion when they looked at her.

Mutant girl, creature of blood and shadow, too slippery to catch sight of unless she willed it.

But then.

The Wolf had no reason to detest those parts of her, though he so wholly detested them in himself. She waited for him to reject her advances, to tell her to fuck off and mean it, but he never did. At any moment, he could have looked and seen past her illusions, but he did not look.

Her glamor was a simple one that must have struck the odd vibration in his guild's medallion, but his suspicion of her remained simple. He feared that she was only toying with him, as a mouser batted at by rodent, but he never guessed at anything more nefarious.

Some summers, they traveled together, riding through a haze of mayflies, striking at the blackened hearts of ghouls and wraiths. Other times, their reunions lasted only a night, one or the other vanished by morning. Often, she stole in to point him toward something she needed accomplished and crept out again.

Meanwhile, the Usurper grew old and complacent, as all men do.

When the White Flame ignited, Fringilla bowed before him. Emhyr var Emreis had the vision and purpose that his father had lacked, shrewd enough to look at her and be delighted and allow her to champion his armies.

He did not have to know that what he saw was only what she wished him to see.

Devout girl, unforgiving to the White Flame’s enemies, cold and tireless as a conduit of His cruelty. The ends justified the means. She knew what sordid secrets Emhyr kept, the true heart of his wicked plans, and held her tongue. He wore almost as many masks as she did.

But not quite as many.

Now, in the wake of the fires of Sodden, Fringilla slipped back into the Cat’s skin, donned her dusty swords, and stopped an old friend on the road.

* * *

Lying in the hollow beyond the windbreak, she breathed in the fresh scent of morning and touched the crown of Lambert’s head.

He did not seem to realize how fluidly he projected his thoughts to her. With others, especially ones trained as witchers were, she had to make an effort to crack through their skulls, skim through the surface thoughts into deeper truths.

Lambert siphoned all of himself into her, all his little wants, all his aches.

She paused with her fingers brushing the fine wisps of his hairline.

He was dreaming, a smattering of warm images. She saw herself as he saw her. Her own naked breasts and full lips and sinuous muscle. He was in awe of her, body and mind. He desired her, always more of her, and it was not just the fitful, base lust of a man driven by his cock. He wondered about what ticked on the inside of her skull, dreaded the inevitable moment that she would part from him, suffered knowing that pieces of her would always remain unknown.

Pathetic little thing. Rattling with emotion and vitriol. Unable to contain himself, unable to be brave enough to take from life what had been denied him. Prone to spitting and yowling like a tomcat perched on the wall of an alley, growling at trespassers but never doing anything more.

She touched the soft lobe of his ear, thought how easy it would be to reach inside his skull and command him from within. Lobotomize him, freezing away suspicion. Follow him, shuffling and undead, along the route to Kaer Morhen. Worm her way inside its walls. Strike when not a soul suspected it, allowing the husk of his body to slump into its final stillness.

Fringilla placed her lips to his brow and snuck a hand between his naked legs.

* * *

Lambert rose through murky water, his limbs loose and floating. The surface rippled with morning light, and black shapes moved in his periphery, vast and dark. There was no current, yet he could feel it drawing him into deeper shadows all the same.

His legs refused to kick or arms to bend.

His lips parted, and the water rushed in.

He woke on his belly in a swathe of soft grass, the Cat’s thighs pressed between his legs to spread them. One hand gripped tight the muscled round of his backside, and several fingers pressed inside him, crooked down to sweep again and again against his prostate. Each exacting touch inspired a fresh bloom of warmth down his loins and up into his belly.

His body jerked into full wakefulness, arms rising from the slackness of sleep to grasp at fistfuls of long grass.

He knew by the pliant give of his muscles and the pitch of his arousal that she must have been at it a while. Each brush of the pads of her fingers threatened to draw a shudder through the lines of his back and shoulders.

With a sigh, he gave to the impulse, his body tightening and relaxing in turn.

Embarrassing. That he had slept so soundly beneath her, not roused at her first touches, even knowing that he could not and should not trust her. His body opened to her.

“Started without me?” he gasped into the crook of his arm, tilting his chin to look back at her.

The slow progression of dawn haloed her figure in bronze light. She sat back on her heels, her fingers not slacking in their work. Through the glare of sunlight, he could not quite discern what expression she wore, but he could see clearly the leather straps of the harness settled low on her hips.

Aiden twisted her fingers, and he jerked forward against the sensation. The grass smelled sweet and cool, free from dew or frost here under the scant cover of the trees, and he knew a non-mutant would shiver with this much bare skin exposed to the crisp morning air. Lambert shivered but not from cold, Aiden’s hand trailing the goosebumps that rose along his flank.

“Well?” he breathed, feeling a nudge against his low thigh that could only be the smooth head of her favorite phallus. “You going to get on with it?”

“Be patient, Wolf,” said Aiden against the skin of his back as she leaned over him. She smoothed her palm in a slow drag from flank to ribcage, simply feeling him, ending in a grasp of his pectoral muscle as though it were the supple tit of a milkmaid and not hard and roughened by scars. Her fingers withdrew from the loose give of his body. “I’ve been patient. You took an age to finally wake up.”

“Mmm,” Lambert hummed. “Must be that I trust you.”

“Must be,” said Aiden and shifted her hips to press slow and steady inside him.

He opened for her without reservation.

* * *

“Stay,” Lambert gasped into the bunched muscle of his folded arm. He looked debauched and undone, as ugly as any man did in the fading blur of an orgasm. His lips still opened on sharp pants, sweat slicking his hair to his temples. “Stay with me.”

“I’m here,” said Fringilla, leaning to touch her mouth to the flex of his shoulderblades. She held her hips still, the phallus snug within him. He did not know that it had been charmed to allow her to feel an echo of sensation. His body clenched warm around her, and she easily withheld her pleased reaction.

“No,” he said, catching his breath. “Stay this winter. I’m going-- I'm headed home this year. War's made it a bitch to try and winter anywhere else, I'll bet. I'm headed to--

"Kaer Morhen," said Fringilla, stunned by her good fortune. She had expected to needle and pry, phrase a request to winter with him in a way that made it his idea.

"Kaer Morhen," said the Wolf and twisted around to kiss her on the mouth.

“What’s in it for me?” she asked against his lips, not having to fake her smug expression. Brow arching, he shifted his hips back against her.

“You gotta ask that?”

“Who else will winter there?” Fringilla asked, though she knew, of course she knew. Her men had tracked the princess to the White Wolf and then could track her no further. Geralt of Rivia knew well how to leave no trace. But there were few places left that offered refuge to a witcher.

Lambert shrugged, slumping back onto his folded arms. He seemed content to lie beneath her the rest of the morning, the sun warming their protected hollow.

“Who knows. Not many of us left.”

Fringilla slipped the phallus from within his body and lay across his broad back, the softness of her small breasts a delightful contrast to the hard muscle beneath. She was far smaller than him, but lying like this, she felt irrationally that she covered him completely, swallowing and consuming.

“The Continent has less need of us," she said.

Soon, she would have to shed the Cat's skin. Soon, she would have no further need of the man beneath her.

“Glad you’re not dead,” he said, voice muffled and heavy.

Would she miss this, when he was gone? Would he anticipate the killing blow, the lethal curse? Would he surrender to her as he had to the press of her fingers, lax and trusting? Would he glimpse the black heart of her in the last moments, look at her in disdain and disappointment?

She did not yet have to find out.

Fringilla breathed through a deep sigh to feel the way it echoed in his own chest, their ribcages fitting snug together.

She could rest here a while longer, cradled in the soft hollow sheltered by the windbreak.

Fringilla could love him for just a breath more.

**Author's Note:**

> this idea was prompted by the comment that no one would ship fringilla/lambert instead of lambert/aiden so then i went ahead and did both at the same time because i'm stinky


End file.
